The September 11th attack
Workers vow to go on with business
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Jimmy Dunne marshals his employees with bearhugs, backrubs and booming exhortations to keep up the good work. Then this Wall Street workaholic, whose boyhood friend and mentor are both missing, shuts the door to his office and swallows back tears.
Jennifer Szot, remarkably fresh after four hours' sleep and a breakfast of two Tylenols, has begun the grim job of collecting toothbrushes belonging to missing workers, trying to help coroners with DNA identification of bodies.
Andrew Armstrong, a friend of Dunne's who came without being called, has spent four days searching out and hiring grief counselors and relief workers, and setting up the bank accounts to raise money for workers' families.
Since Tuesday's terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the extended family of Sandler O'Neill & Partners — an investment firm missing 67 of the 90 employees who worked in Tower 2 — has battled a nightmare.
But most striking in the cramped quarters Sandler has squeezed into with two sister companies is that there is barely any space, or time, or place to mourn. There is simply too much to do if this business, whose workers call themselves a family, is to survive.
"We lost close friends, very, very close friends," says Fred Price, one of the Sandler's senior executives, his voice calm and modulated despite the nonstop buzz of telephones and the shouts that pass for conversation. "But I think our resolution now is to honor them and their families, and the best way to do that is to rebuild their firm."
The people of Sandler will tell you, every last one of them, they have no doubts that will happen. To look at their decimated employee roster, you can only shake your head. Then listen to the insistent edge in their voices, and you can't help but believe them.
Most of Sandler's employees had already reached their desks Tuesday morning in their offices on the 104th floor, overlooking the Statue of Liberty. Some of them were making final arrangements for the company's annual insurance conference, which was to be held Thursday, when the first plane hit.
By the time the survivors stumbled from the charred stump of the building, two-thirds of the headquarters staff was missing along with two outside consultants.
The 67 missing workers comprise more than a third of the company's total work force of 175.
Those unaccounted for include Herman Sandler, the chief executive and undisputed visionary, who founded the firm with six other men in 1988.
Also missing is Chris Quackenbush, the executive in charge of investment banking. Dunne, who has taken over the helm of the firm, recalled Friday that he and Quackenbush had been best friends ever since they met as caddies at a Long Island golf course when they were both 14.
"I'm not this bad out there," Dunne said, struggling to suppress tears and pointing to the common area outside his office where his employees worked the phones. "The most important thing we can do for each other is care for each other and demonstrate some strength."
That resolve has proven extraordinary fuel for Sandler employees as they search for their colleagues and rush to rebuild.
Within hours of the attack, the remnants of the staff — some like Mark Fitzgibbon still wearing clothes permeated by the smoke and dust — made their way to the midtown office tower where a command center was set up in the borrowed offices.
People like Szot and her husband, Derek, a longtime Sandler worker now at an Internet venture backed by the firm, began visiting hospital emergency rooms and other sites in search of lost friends.
Analysts and traders and administrative assistants manned the phones, calling hospitals, police, the families of those missing, urging them not to give up.
When John Faith, who left Sandler a few years ago, called offering to help reconstruct a computer system, he was embraced as kin. When Quackenbush's sister walked into the office Friday afternoon, she was cheered and hugged and then put to work.
At the same time, Dunne and other managers have submerged themselves in phone calls and meetings, piecing together a working business from the barest resources. The first test came Thursday, when the firm executed trades as the first markets reopened. The firm promised to be fully operational by today, when the stock markets are supposed to reopen.
The company has found the most unlikely allies in that quest.
Rival CEOs have called to donate computers, desks and office space, to offer personal loans, to tell Dunne they will perform trades on his company's behalf without any commission.
The exhilaration of every gain has been offset by the grim failure of efforts to locate the missing. Twice this week, police called to say they had found someone alive with a name matching one on the Sandler list. Both times, colleagues rushed to the hospital, only to find the survivors happened to have the same name as their still-missing colleagues.
"Every time we got a little burst of hope," executive Terry Maltese said, "it was just pounded down."
When St. Vincent's Hospital called Friday with yet another name matching one on the Sandler list, Szot took it as a harbinger of good news, even though the survivor's birthdate didn't match her friend's. Maybe the next call, she said.
Desperation, perhaps, but this corporate family must manufacture its own hope.
"If you could just tell them to keep all their prayers for us," Szot said, walking a visitor to the door. "We still need them."
